Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub
Whenever two movies that share a similar premise are released in the same year, movie geeks like to figure out which one is Deep Impact and which is Armageddon. Those two 1998 blockbusters shared the same setup of an asteroid on a world-ending collision course with Earth, but took very different approaches. Deep Impact was a relatively sombre affair while Armageddon was a Michael Bay action comedy.
Project Hail Mary is the first movie that plays like it is simultaneously its own version of both Deep Impact and Armageddon. Half the film is a sobering existential drama while the rest is a knockabout romp complete with a comic relief puppet. Thankfully, Ryan Gosling's performance just about ensures we don't receive too many injuries from tonal whiplash.
Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller's movie is adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, the author responsible for the source material for Ridley Scott's The Martian. Project Hail Mary shares the same scriptwriter as The Martian, Drew Goddard, and much of it plays like a sillier version of that modern sci-fi gem. Both movies are centred on an astronaut left alone in space, using their scientific know-how to figure shit out. The key difference is that here the astronaut isn't actually an astronaut at all, but rather a school teacher plucked from obscurity to save our planet.
Having become a pariah in the scientific community for a controversial paper, Gosling's Ryland Grace is pulled from his classroom by the authorities, who are hoping his previously dismissed theories might have some relevance to the threat currently posed by a strange organism destroying the stars. Every star but one, Tau Ceti, is being attacked, which will eventually lead to a new ice age, and Grace is tasked with figuring out Tau Ceti's secret.
The movie actually opens in media res, with Grace waking on a spaceship 20,000 light years from Earth. After initial grogginess his memory begins to return and the film adopts a flashback narrative that fills in how he ended up being shot into space himself (two accompanying astronauts, a pilot and engineer, died on the journey). Grace now finds himself on a solo mission to Tau Ceti to figure out its immunity to the deadly organism. But he soon discovers he's not alone when a giant spaceship arrives with a single passenger, an alien from the 40 Eridani system. Due to its resemblance to a rock (think an infant version of the giant rock monster from Galaxy Quest), Grace names his new companion Rocky and figures out a way to communicate with the alien via a DIY translation app on a laptop. Turns out Rocky is on a similar mission to save his world, and the two unlikely heroes must put their heads together to save their galaxies.
Rocky is a physical creation puppeteered and voiced by James Ortiz, and the decision to eschew CG effects likely goes a long way to making the relationship between Grace and Rocky so convincing. Gosling surely appreciated having a physical co-star to act against rather than a tennis ball on a stick, and there is a palpable chemistry between the actor and the puppet. But that relationship becomes a little strained at a certain point, and it's never as emotionally affecting as the movie would like. A nod to a famous tear-jerking moment from E.T. is nowhere near as effective as Spielberg's original. This is largely because the film has an oddly glib attitude towards Grace and Rocky's mission that is completely out of whack with how seriously it's presented in the flashbacks. In those flashbacks we can feel the stakes, largely through the under-stated but revealing performance of Sandra Hüller as Eva, the woman in charge of the Hail Mary project (Hüller gets to repeat her Toni Erdmann karakoe shtick here), but they don't translate to the major tomfoolery we see play out 20,000 light years away.
It's not quite a case of "Who is this movie for?", as children and adults will likely find something to grasp onto here, but it's all a little too silly for grownups and probably too light on action to hold the attention of kids (not to mention its 50-year-old pop culture references). Its running time is longer than such sci-fi classics as Star Wars, Solaris and 2001, but very little actually happens to justify its 156 minutes. There's a commendable attempt to realistically portray how two alien lifeforms might figure out how to communicate, but after spending the length of an average TV episode on this detail it ultimately boils down to Grace's unlikely invention of a universal translator. With so much time wasted on this point you realise why most sci-fi movies simply have their aliens speak English without question.
He's no Jar Jar Binks, but patience for Rocky may vary, and after a while I was hoping Grace would shoot the muppet out the airlock. Not because the character is annoying but because its presence turns what initially seems like a cinematic odyssey (All is Lost in space) into a theatrical two-hander. The creature essentially exists for the same reason as Will Smith's dog in I Am Legend, so the protagonist has an excuse to speak the film's plot out loud. It's a damning indictment of the modern audience, so distracted by their phones that they struggle to engage with a movie on a visual level, and a reminder that despite it being initially released on IMAX screens, Project Hail Mary is an Amazon production destined to be listened to while folding laundry rather than watched with the wondrous eyes of the generations that first experienced Star Wars and 2001 on the big screen. The real Hail Mary would have been making a movie that forces the audience to engage with itself rather than the other way around, but no streaming service is sinking $250 million into such an endeavour in 2026.
Project Hail Mary is in UK/ROI cinemas from March 20th.
